World Wind Watch | Green Energy News

July 6, 2003 – Vol.8 No.15

WORLD WIND WATCH.

The Mountaineer Wind Energy Center is now complete and open for business. The largest wind farm in the Eastern U.S. - 44 NEG-Micon 1.5 megawatt turbines for 66 megawatts capacity - is located on Backbone Mountain in Tucker County, West Virginia.

The facility is owned by FPL Energy and operates under a 20-year wholesale power agreement with Excelon Corporation. Marketers for the wind energy include Washington Gas Energy Services (WGES) and Community Energy. Among the 10,000 residential and commercial customers for green energy from Mountaineer is Austin Grill which has purchased 100 percent wind energy for its six restaurants in the nation’s capitol area. The purchase will increase the electric bill for the chain by $40,000 each year - but they're not complaining, even glad to pay the premium. Visit WGES at http://www.wges.com/ , Community Energy at http://www.community energy.biz and Austin Grill at http://www.austingrill.com/

Vertical axis wind turbines - those that look like an egg beater - never caught on in the market place the way horizontal axis turbines have. Yet vertical axis turbines have one distinct advantage over what is now considered conventional turbine design. Wind from any direction can turn a vertical axis turbine without the turbine turning to meet the wind as horizontal axis machines must do.

McKenzie Bay has announced that its subsidiary Dermond have begun marketing its first two commercial products WindStor (tm) and the DERMOND Wind Turbine, a vertical axis machine.

DERMOND will target markets for off-grid power, wind power for remote and severe weather locations (such as islands or Arctic regions of the U.S and Canada), roof top installations (such as multistory buildings in cities) and of course in applications where wind direction shifts frequently.

Windstor, the other product which the company says will be commercially available in 2004, is a turnkey DERMOND wind turbine combined with a backup battery system using a Vanadium-based battery. With the inclusion of the battery system the DERMOND turbine becomes an uninterruptible power supply.

The company has plans to install three 100 kilowatt turbines as demonstration units in the next few months. Two of the three will be the Windstor package with the back-up battery. Visit Dermond at http://www.mckenziebay.com/ (click Overview).